Q. What's the best length for a web infomercial?

  • A. The short answer would be less than 5 minutes but that would be insensitive to your particular selling scenario.

    So the long answer would go something like this …

    Depending on the product, you should be able to communicate your USP (unique selling proposition -- why buy from you, why buy from you now), give enough emotional context, demonstrate your features, hint on benefits, and try out minor yesses and tested selling sentences in 3-7 minutes. Medium is the message: Web visitors have limited attention span, they have millions of other page returns to choose from, and they have a huge issue with trust.

Q. What is your technique for increasing sales tenfold?

  • A. In short, intelligent communication. People like it. Never underestimate the intelligence of people. Never talk down to them. Don't waste time on addy-talk, it gets filtered out. Sure, you can hype a buyer to a one-time sale, but BS will not work for building life-time customers.

    In 1923, Claude Hopkins said it better: "Any attempt to sell, if apparent, creates corresponding resistance." People don't want to be sold to, people don't want to be pressured to buy -- and if you are doing your sales job properly through education marketing, you never have to "sell" again in your life.

    To a highly targeted audience, the model of selling we like for its simplicity is the PAS model (Problem - Agitation - Solution). Its similar to the Rodale formula, a little bit of education, agitation of the problem, and a clearly stated solution. Like Eugene Schwartz suggests: You want the person to jump and exclaim,
    "you mean to tell me I'm in that much trouble".

    To less targeted audiences, we use the well-known AIDA model.

Q. What's the success rate of web infomercials?

  • A. No public hard figures on that. What we know is that internet video is booming. ShopNBC is ramping up their mini infomercial content, hundreds of companies are taking advantage of increased bandwidth and higher connection speeds.

    Submitting your videos to a growing number of video sites is really free advertising -- they can pull traffic to your site. Why not use them.

    We've been able to increase sales 10-fold within 6 months -- probably not on the strength of video presentation alone, but in combination of organic, paid, web press releases and other tactics.

Q. What's the key success factor in web selling?

  • A. As in any other selling, it's Trust. For long-term repeat sales, it's Being Predictable. People don't buy from people they don't trust. Being predictable is the core success formula for franchising -- by and large, McDonald's is McDonald's in any city -- people have a pretty good idea what they will get -- life is predictable without nasty surprises.

    Internet selling is different from any other selling. Here's why: relative anonymity (click away, nobody cares), short attention span (what else is out there?), resistance to internet scams (fear of being victim of some fraud scheme), and basic technical ineptness of people (people aren't that techno savvy and some 70% of shopping carts are abandoned).

    You want to create immediate rapport and trust. You want to be interesting enough so they will stay on your site, and you may want to simplify the process of buying to one-two click process with a shopping cart video to reduce buyer remorse.

Q. What's the best format?

  • Trade show video -- splashy short format (30 sec. - 2 min.), purpose is to stop the aisle stroller and begin relationship -- obtain buyer qualification, get contact info, hand out a card or DVD to qualified buyers.

    Web site SEM video -- purpose is to pull the visitor from the search process; to stop his search, then to differentiate your products from competitors -- the other million pages he got when he entered the search word.

    Web site long-format video -- once the presentation needs to go beyond 5 minutes, you may want to break it down to "semantic" chunks or handle with audio mp3 file he can download to his iPod.

    Other formats: In the television world, there are a number of models -- lecture format, demo show, live auction, sitcommercial, documercial, storymercial, brandmercial and even featuremercial that have set formats and known pulling power.

    The general rule is "The more you tell the more you sell", David Ogilvy sold cars with a 42-page sales letter! In non-impulse, high-ticket purchases, the buyer needs to be "warmed up" for the purchase decision, in other cases, low-cost items can be sold with short-format 2-3 minute video. The more money you are asking, the better case you have to build for your proposition.

Q. What is the procedure and how long will it take?

  • A. We use existing sales materials and discussions to create multiple scripts for testing purposes. We show voice over text, shots, animations etc. Once script is approved by you, we or one of our regional partners comes to your site to shoot video and stills.

    Minimal disruption to your business: Because the exact shots were already planned in the script, shooting usually takes less than a day with minimal disruption to your business.

    The turnaround time: The footage is edited with added voice over, animations, transitions, stills as required — typical turnaround with approvals and changes is about 10-20 days. The finished movie is first mounted on a server in a password-protected location for your approval and sign off. Final approved movie can be mounted on your server or on ours.

Q. I'm in Hawaii, how can you work with us?

  • A. We can work with you anywhere in the United States and Canada. The critical components (strategy, positioning, scripting, editing) are handled electronically online and via telephone with you regardless of your geographical location.

    We also have key sales partners in Delray Beach, FL; San Rafael, CA, St. Paul, MN; and Toronto, ON. In addition, for on-location filming, we use regional production partners in all major cities who come to your location to film (if we are not able to or we want to save travel costs).

Q. What makes you different, why should I hire you?

  • A. We're really a sales and marketing company with video production capabilities.

    Why it makes sense: There is tremendous built-in cost efficiencies in partnering with a single-source supplier: There's better cohesion and economies of familiarity in the marketing strategy when you work with the same people who established your graphic standards, did your video, manned your trade show booth and talked to actual buyers, organized your follow-up webinar, did your follow-up mailings, designed your web questionnaires, wrote your product press releases, wrote the Google ads for your PPC campaign, and know what your company colors are in CMYK, RGB and hexadecimal color spaces. Even at search engine marketing level, the everchanging algorithms of search engines mean that someone has to monitor your organic and pay-per-click performance continually -- few companies have SEM specialists on board nor do they have the time to do it themselves.

    (Our sister sites are InternetSalesAgency.com where we sell on commission; and WebSalesInternational.com that's aimed for SMBs wanting to go the top 10 internet languages.)

    We are a production company that is really all about selling — we produce tools for selling, components of a total selling system: lead generation, decision making support tools, follow-up, and repeat sales.

Q. What's the cost of producing a video?

  • A. There is no one simple answer. It's the same as walking into a car dealership and asking to buy a "car". It all depends on production values, shoot locations, style of editing, talent costs and so forth. Just like buying a car — from economy model with no options to top of the line loaded with options. We work with the idea that web video should be affordable for small and medium-sized businesses who do not have hundreds of thousands to produce a video. At our pricing point, rough rule is about $1000-$1500 per finished minute. A typical 5-minute video from start to finish would be about $7000.

Q. What's included in the 24-hour Salesman package?

  • A. We include everything from concept to compression: market positioning, target audience assessment, USP, script writing, videography, photography, music, editing, titling, graphics, compression, and mounting on server. What is not included are the various translations and voice over to other languages, set up and fees for pay-per-click campaigns. There are a number of powerful SEM options for creating greater impact on organic rankings that we can discuss later.

Q. What about multilingual production?

  • A. Well, it's becoming increasingly important, it's the non-English speaking sector (67%) of internet users that is growing the fastest. (Frankly, THAT's where the next generation of billionaires will be made.) Video can speak any number of languages with relative ease simply by voice over done by a native speaker. We try to avoid on-camera presence and film the necessary demonstration so that the voice over can be easily switched to whatever language you require.

Q. I'd like to receive your proposal, what's the next step?

  • A. Go to contact page and fill out the form or call John 1-800-535-4999. Once we receive your interest form, we will forward Confidentiality Agreement (if required), and contact you via telephone or email for further information, and then prepare a skeleton quotation outlining positioning, communication objective, memorability factors, and other features that go into making your video a success. Remember, we are not interested in producing a "nice video" for you. We've increased sales by spending money wisely.
Download InternetSalesVideo newsletter (PDF) and
24-Hour Salesman Questions for Better Message Definition.
Name:
Email: